to assent, rose in her esteem by leaps and bounds.  Before the end of that conversation Mrs. Ranger was convinced that she had always believed the doctors should be women.  “Who understands a woman but a woman?  Who understands a child but a woman?  And what’s a man when he’s sick but a child?” She was impatient for the marriage.  And when Madelene asked if she’d object to having a small doctor’s sign somewhere on the front fence, she looked astounded at the question.  “We must do better than that,” she said.  “I’ll have you an office—­just two or three rooms—­built down by the street so as to save people coming clear up here.  That’d lose you many a customer.”

“Yes, it might lose us a good many,” said Madelene, and you’d never have thought the “us” deliberate.

That capped the climax.  Mrs. Ranger was her new daughter’s thenceforth.  And Madelene went away, if possible happier than when she and Arthur had straightened it all out between themselves the night before.  Had she not lifted that fine old woman up from the grave upon which she was wearily lying, waiting for death?  Had she not made her happy by giving her something to live for?  Something to live for!  “She looked years younger immediately,” thought Madelene.  “That’s the secret of happiness—­something to live for, something real and useful.”

“I never thought you’d find anybody good enough for you,” said Mrs. Ranger to her son that evening.  “But you have.  She’s got a heart and a head both—­and most of the women nowadays ain’t got much of either.”

And it was that night as Ellen was saying her prayers, that she asked God to forgive her the sin of secret protest she had let live deep in a dark corner of her heart—­reproach of Hiram for having cut off their son.  “It was for the best,” she said.  “I see it now.”

CHAPTER XX

LORRY’S ROMANCE

When Charles Whitney heard Arthur was about to be married, he offered him a place on the office staff of the Ranger-Whitney Company at fifteen hundred a year.  “It is less than you deserve on your record,” he wrote, “but there is no vacancy just now, and you shall go up rapidly.  I take this opportunity to say that I regard your father’s will as the finest act of the finest man I ever knew, and that your conduct, since he left us, is a vindication of his wisdom.  America has gone stark mad on the subject of money.  The day is not far distant when it has got to decide whether property shall rule work or work shall rule property.  Your father was a courageous pioneer.  All right-thinking men honor him.”